In case you wanna enter an association with me, here are my answers to the list of questions:
1 - 2) How much money will I allocate for research and development?
$1000 / month for a period of up to three years.
3) How much money will I allocate for trading?
$10,000 - $20,000 trough an Interactive Brokers account.
There are also several other factors to consider:
a) What knowledge are you bringing to the table?
I know quantitative finance: Itô's lemma, derivation of the Black-Scholes equation by several arguments, equating volatility to probabilities, knowledge on how and why HFT works with options (useful when / if I'll do market making, useless now at 10 seconds latency connection). Have worked 10 years in finance, 2 of them for an options market making desk, the rest doing price, risk and volatility calculations, handling marketdata, keeping position & PNL (not that easy when one has to do it in realtime for 100k+ positions). But bottom line is I'm not making money by myself yet and anyone claiming that's easy is free to invest their own capital.
b) How do you handle intellectual property?
As a worst case, investing in R&D will still produce potentially valuable intellectual property. Building upon it, with further investment, could recover the costs and make a profit. Problem is who will work on R&D apart from the investors (I'm in favor of hiring someone full time), but what do you do when an investor wants to leave or the employee quits? I don't have much trust in NDAs especially when barely having money for R&D, takes a lot of money to ensure and enforce those NDAs. Then who would you employ? I'd favor someone who would take equity in addition to salary (in order to agree to a lower salary and commit to spending the full three years into the company and make his fortune by himself if he's capable of, with the help of the other guys / investors). But realistically that's like looking for hiring Santa Claus so intellectual property agreements will be a real issue. I don't have a good answer for how to handle them at the moment.